Tiama Hanson-Drury is CPTO at Opus 2, the legal technology company behind the systems that run some of the world's largest and most high-stakes litigation. She started her career in sales, moved into product in 2010 and has spent the last 16 years split roughly evenly between individual contributor and leadership roles. Her verdict on AI in product organisations is neither evangelism nor scepticism: the tooling has removed software as a bottleneck, but the markers of quality that mattered before AI have not changed, and teams that forget them end up shipping slop and burning out. In this episode, we discuss:
- Why a sales background is better preparation for product than an engineering one, and how to lead engineers without pretending to be an expert
- How the promise of doing more with AI is quietly producing overload and burnout, and what leaders owe their teams in response
- Why high AI adoption scores mean nothing if pull request sizes are ballooning and someone else has to review the output
- The three things Tiama looks for in her teams now: outcome focus over craft, curiosity, and a culture of sharing failure as readily as success
- Why the right move is not to hand three of your seven steps to AI, but to start again from the outcome you want
- How Opus 2 went from shipping every six to 12 weeks to shipping daily, and why that made documentation and planning more important, not less
- The case for betting on humans in the loop when your customers explicitly prefer it
- Why Opus 2 is still hiring juniors, and how to build commercial judgment when the groundwork can be skipped
- The one situation where Tiama tells people to let AI write the first draft rather than the second
Chapters
- (01:31) From sales to product
- (03:24) Why the move is less obvious than it sounds
- (04:34) Leading engineering without an engineering background
- (06:28) How outsider questions sharpen engineering teams
- (07:36) What AI has changed for a CPTO
- (08:16) Overload, burnout and the pressure to token max
- (10:32) Adoption scores versus quality signals
- (11:39) What AI adoption actually looks like inside law firms
- (12:42) Outcomes over output
- (14:07) How Opus 2 built its AI strategy
- (16:07) Removing friction from an AI rollout
- (16:53) Partnering with AI instead of splitting up the steps
- (18:08) A message from Mike Belsito
- (19:40) Three things AI asks of a team
- (21:47) More agency, and why planning matters more
- (23:51) Scaling a team on conflicting evidence
- (26:09) Betting on humans in the loop
- (27:36) Why Opus 2 keeps hiring juniors
- (29:44) Building judgment when the work moves faster
- (32:36) Sharing your own AI operating system
- (33:22) AI slop, CVs and the hiring algorithm
- (36:17) Top tips for a product career in the age of AI
- (38:36) Wrap-up
Referenced
- Opus 2: https://www.opus2.com
- Opus 2 announces addition of Tiama Hanson-Drury as chief product and technology officer: https://www.opus2.com/news/opus-2-announces-cpto-tiama-hanson-drury/
- Minna Technologies, where Tiama was previously chief product officer: https://minnatechnologies.com
- DX, the developer intelligence platform used to track squad performance: https://getdx.com
- DORA metrics: https://dora.dev
- Vote for Mike Belsito's South by Southwest 2027 session: https://tinyurl.com/belsitosxsw
Where to find Tiama Hanson-Drury
